By and large, work has been, well, work.  Lots of hours at the office, lots of hours stuck in traffic sweating like Kevin Mitnick during a traffic stop.  When I haven't been logging time behind a console, I've either been trying to get my head back into Python coding (try as I might, I just don't understand GUI programming in general or PyGTK in particular), reading data sheets, reading up on the Arduino microcontroller, or pulling a Tesla while pondering the best way to build my latest obsession, a laser synthtar.

You see, it all started at HacDC a couple …

When coding something in Python, it's said that your logic should be as simple as possible because the language does the heavy lifting for you. The nice thing about Python is that it makes it very easy to implement complex functionality because all the fiddly stuff that you normally spend ages coding and debugging (like linked lists and sorting algorithms) is already done for you. Also, the basic data types/objects that Python gives you are as orthogonal as you can get without throwing your hands up and using sticky notes instead.

In short, I spent two weeks debugging a …

After many months of near misses and scheduling conflicts, Kyrin finally got Lyssa and I to join him for a Friday evening at Piratz Tavern (8402 Georgia Avenue; Silver Spring, MD; 20910; phone 301-588-9001 to cap off a long work week. Hasufin, Lyssa, and I piled into the TARDIS and set course for Silver Spring around 1900 EST5EDT, which we figured would be late enough to dodge weekend traffic on the Beltway.

It wasn't, actually, but we still made decent time without actually being fashionably late.

Piratz Tavern is a very small, unassuming place on a corner across the street …

When working with the Perl, you can use the module Getopt::Long to implement your command line argument parser. However, if your script can take a string of words after the arguments, like this

./my_script.pl --arg1 --arg2 --arg3 foo bar baz quux

the -- options will be removed from @ARGV, leaving only the other words (foo, bar, baz, et al). This means that you don't have to write any routines to dig them out of @ARGV.

No, I'm not kidding.

One Henry Ihejirika developed a web application called Ziinet, which was an expert system for bankruptcy law that provided a service to whomever could pay the $216us charge for 60 days of access. The idea was that you paid your fee to log into the web application and hammer in the information relevant to your bankruptcy proceedings. The application would analyse your situation, draw up affadavits (presumably drawing upon a database of pre-written statements and paragraphs - if you write enough papers of any kind, it only stands to reason that re-using parts of older papers is …

The actions of a systems cracker trying to get a foothold in someone's network by social engineering the people in the NOC and someone hunting for a job who is trying to get hold of a human being in the HR department somewhere in a company are not that different.

GNU Screen makes coding so much easier: Run screen to multiplex your shell, then run a text editor in one, a debugger in another, have another shell open to compile.. no more mousing between windows. There isn't much of a learning curve, if you feel comfortable coding under Unix (or using the Cygwin tools for Windows) you'll pick it up in no time.

Just because it's usually the one-half teaspoon that falls off the holder and it's usually the one-half teaspoon that fell off the holder that you grabbed out of the drawer doesnt't mean that it's the one-half teaspoon that you really grabbed. Always look before you use measuring implements.

Coding with a teddy bear in your lap helps immensely.